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Anne Zieger is a healthcare journalist who has written about the industry for 30 years. Her work has appeared in all of the leading healthcare industry publications, and she's served as editor in chief of several healthcare B2B sites.

In some ways, mobile health security safeguards haven’t changed much for quite some time. Making sure that tablets and phones are protected against becoming easy network intrusion points is a given. Also seeing to it that such devices use strong passwords and encrypted data exchange whenever possible is a must.

But increasingly, as mobile apps become more tightly knit with enterprise infrastructure, there’s more security issues to consider. After all, we’re increasingly talking about mission-critical apps which rely on ongoing access to sensitive enterprise networks. Now more than ever, enterprises must come up with strategies which control how data flows into the enterprise network. In other words, we’re not just talking about locking down the end points, but also seeing to it that powerful edge devices are treated like the vulnerable hackable gateways they are.

To date, however, there’s still not a lot of well-accepted guidance out there spelling out what steps health organizations should take to ramp up their mobile security. For example, NIST has issued its “Securing Electronic Health Records On Mobile Devices” guideline, but it’s only a few months old and remains in draft form to date.

The truth is, the healthcare industry isn’t as aware of, or prepared for, the need for mobile healthcare data security as it should be. While healthcare organizations are gradually deploying, testing and rolling out new mobile platforms, securing them isn’t being given enough attention. What’s more, clinicians aren’t being given enough training to protect their mobile devices from hacks, which leaves some extremely valuable data open to the world.

Nonetheless, there are a few core approaches which can be torqued up help protect mobile health data this year:

Encryption: Encrypting data in transit wasn’t invented yesterday, but it’s still worth a check in to make sure your organization is doing so. Gregory Cave notes that data should be encrypted when communicated between the (mobile) application and the server. And he recommends that Web traffic be transmitted through a secure connection using only strong security protocols like Secure Sockets Layer or Transport Layer Security. This also should include encrypting data at rest.

Application hardening: Before your organization rolls out mobile applications, it’s best to see to it that security defects are detected before and addressed before deployment. Application hardening tools — which protect code from hackers — can help protect mobile deployments, an especially important step for software placed on machines and locations your organization doesn’t control. They employ techniques such as obfuscation, which hides code structure and flow within an application, making it hard for intruders to reverse engineer or tamper with the source code.

Training staff: Regardless of how sophisticated your security systems are, they’re not going to do much good if your staff leaves the proverbial barn door open. As one security expert points out, healthcare organizations need to make staffers responsible for understanding what activities lead to breaches, or security hackers will still find a toehold.”It’s like installing the most sophisticated security system in the world for your house, but not teaching the family how to use it,” said Grant Elliott, founder and CEO of risk management and compliance firm Ostendio.

In addition to these efforts, I’d argue that staffers need to really get it as to what happens when security goes awry. Knowing that mistakes will upset some IT guy they’ve never met is one thing; understanding that a breach could cost millions and expose the whole organization to disrepute is a bit more memorable. Don’t just teach the security protocols, teach the costs of violating them. A little drama — such as the little old lady who lost her home due to PHI theft — speaks far more powerfully than facts and figures, don’t you agree?

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